Christobel Kent - A Darkness Descending

They were streaming past Chiara as she stood there in the doorway, then one detached himself from the crowd, stopped. Smiled.

‘I suppose you were there last night?’ he asked, head tilted, between her and the sun. He lifted the books from her arms. ‘Let me take those.’

She looked into his eyes. She’d tell Dad tonight.

*

Eighty miles out east, on the seafront at Viareggio, the sun that shone on Chiara Cavallaro in the Piazza San Marco sat high over the flat-calm silver sea, still strong enough to warm the few morning bathers on the groomed sands. Less groomed than they would have been a month ago, the striped umbrellas and wooden loungers depleted, the bathing stations closing down one by one as September cooled and drew to a close, but the town was still busy. Plenty of the hotels, indeed, were still booked out, the cheaper, more discreet ones, lovers stealing a last few illicit days at the end of the summer without the need for a sea view.

The Stella Maris had vacancies, but then it was expensive for what it was. A faded place one street in from the front, its blue-washed stucco no longer the deep cobalt it had been in better days, an overblown garden of unpruned magnolia and laurels, and twelve old-fashioned, under-decorated rooms, fewer than half of them occupied this sunny Tuesday morning.

‘It’s “Do not disturb”,’ said Vesna, coming out to shake her dusters among the laurels and addressing herself to her employer, Signore Calzaghe. His seedy, overweight bulk parked in a grubby swing seat on the Stella Maris’s verandah, his chin rough with at least a day’s white stubble, Calzaghe was the hotel’s owner, manager and holder of any other self-appointed position that did not require him actually to lift a finger in its service. He frowned back at her.

‘Number five?’ Unfortunately for Vesna, her employer might be lazy but he had an excellent head for detail, for numbers and names and quantities (of guest soaps, for example, which he required her to dry out in the airing cupboard if barely used, or linen washed, or rolls ordered for the breakfasts). He rubbed his chin thoughtfully. ‘So? Less work for you, I’d have thought. Fewer towels to the laundry, too.’

Vesna saw that crafty glint in his eye and could see he was wondering how he could somehow recoup that unused labour for himself, that twenty minutes she would have spent in number five setting the guest’s toiletries straight, closing her wardrobe door, making her bed.

She tucked the dusters into the belt of her maid’s uniform, a pink as faded as the hotel facade’s blue, made for a larger woman. Better that than too tight: Vesna had had her fill of too-tight maid’s uniforms, and the male guests’ response to them. The female guest in number five had bothered her from the day she walked in, pale and breathless as if she’d run there all the way from the station. Vesna opened her mouth to say so, and closed it again: her instinct was that the last thing the woman in number five needed was Calzaghe on her case.

‘Did she say how long she was planning to stay?’ He was chewing his fat cheek now, his piggy eyes contemplating the possibility that he was going somehow to lose out on this deal.

‘She wasn’t sure, she said,’ said Vesna. ‘But she’d be gone by the weekend.’

He sighed, a sound he made self-important, impatient, accusatory all at once.

‘Give it another day,’ he said. ‘She’s only herself to blame. If the linen’s not changed.’ And he settled back into the swing seat and closed his eyes.

‘You’ve heard of him, right? Have you even seen the papers this morning?’

Giuli was waiting for him in the office, even twitchier than usual as Sandro came past her into the sunlit room. A tiny cup of takeaway espresso sat on his desk, kept warm by a twist of paper napkin over the top, two newspapers folded beside it. His priorities set at caffeine rather than news, Sandro dropped the briefcase down heavily in his seat and downed the coffee in one, standing beside his desk.

‘Not enough, this morning,’ he said. ‘Shall we go out for another?’

Giuli gave him one of her looks.

There was something about her this morning: he’d got used to the new, put-together Giuli, he realized, lipstick, clothes neat if not always conventional, groomed. This morning she was wearing scuffed boots and hadn’t brushed her hair.

Hold on, he thought. It’s Tuesday: she’s not even supposed to be here.

‘Aren’t you supposed to be at the Women’s Centre?’ he asked.

‘Rosselli,’ she repeated impatiently. ‘I was at that meeting last night. You’ve heard of him, right?’ When Sandro just watched her, trying to make his brain shift a gear, she said impatiently, ‘I’ll go out and get you another, if necessary, but I don’t think this is something we can talk about in a bar. Not in San Frediano, at any rate. This is his turf.’ She took a breath. ‘I said I wasn’t well,’ she said. ‘I’m going in after lunch.’

Sandro frowned. She took the Women’s Centre very seriously, as a rule: it had been her lifeline when she’d come out of prison.

But he said nothing. ‘Rosselli,’ he repeated, instead. Yes, he knew him. ‘He’s your guy. Your leader. The — what’s it? — Frazione Verde.’

Heard of him? Yes, Sandro had heard of him. On every street corner in the Oltrarno, it seemed, the little designs had appeared, spray-painted through a stencil, rather neat and clever: Frazione = Azione , in fluorescent green. They were creeping north of the river too. One had even appeared mysteriously on the corner of their building in Santa Croce, riding the tidemark of street dirt that rose higher every summer. Under it the impassioned scrawl, in sprayed black: Niccolo Rosselli e nostro Gandhi.

‘Niccolo Rosselli is our Gandhi.’ What man would want that? Look how it ended. And what was this about the papers?

He studied Giuli’s face, feeling the beginnings of a headache, then following her gaze down he broke off, the front page of the newspaper getting his attention at last. Giuli unfolded the newspaper in front of him with exaggerated care.

There was an inset photograph of an unshaven man in thick glasses, handsome once perhaps, now too gaunt and intense for good looks, staring fiercely from the page. And the bigger photograph was a fuzzy night shot of an ambulance parked on the Via Sant’Agostino outside an old church, something being loaded into the back and a blur of faces staring from the pavement, the ubiquitous elderly woman rubbernecking as she walked her dog.

‘ROSSELLI COLLAPSES AT RALLY’ was the headline.

‘He’s in hospital?’ Sandro frowned down at the bleak photograph. The ambulance on the pavement, the curious bystanders. ‘Is he all right?’

At the innocuous question, gently put, Giuli sat down quite suddenly at his desk, her spiky, determined little face collapsing into anxiety. She tugged the briefcase out from under her and shoved it on to the desk. Sandro pulled up the chair reserved for clients, although Giuli seemed not to notice the reversal in their roles, she was so distracted.

‘They let him go,’ she said, twisting her fingers together on the desktop. ‘No one thinks he’s all right.’

‘Giuli,’ said Sandro gently, prising her hands apart and holding them. ‘What is this political thing of yours? You were never into politics. What is this man to you?’

She looked up and he could see she was all prepared to go into battle, eyes burning, but then it seemed to dawn on her that she was talking to him, to Sandro Cellini, the closest thing to a father and protector she had ever had, and the blaze went out of her. ‘Is it — Enzo?’ He tried to sound reasonable, friendly. ‘Has he got you into this?’